AI Can Be An Awesome Creative Assistant, Here’s How

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TL;DR

• Harvard Business Review has three takes on AI’s potential future. In the first, AI is our creative sidekick, helping us innovate faster by assisting in content creation.
• The dystopian second scenario has AI dominating creativity, potentially drowning out human creators. This might reduce innovation, and the personalization could lead to a more divided society.
• The third scenario predicts a renewed “techlash” against synthetic creativity. As a result, people may begin to value human creativity more and be willing to pay a premium for it.
• Currently, generative AI seems to work best with human partners, even acting as a catalyst for human creativity.

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READ MORE: How Generative AI Could Disrupt Creative Work (Harvard Business Review)

The Harvard Business Review outlines three scenarios that companies should prepare for in the brave new world of AI.

The more optimistic one is that AI will be your best creative assistant. AI tools will give us all a lift away from less menial work to be able to concentrate on the more interesting work of management and curation.

The authors, David De Cremer, Nicola Morini Bianzino and Ben Falk, suggest that we learn “prompt engineering” — the skill of asking the machine the right questions — to produce more relevant and meaningful content that humans will only need to edit somewhat before they can put it to use.

Overall, this scenario paints a world of faster innovation where machine-augmented human creativity will enable mainly rapid iteration.

A doomsday scenario is if machines monopolize creativity. Here, human writers, producers and creators are drowned out by a tsunami of algorithmically-generated content, with some talented creators even opting out of the market.

If that would happen, then an important question that we need to address is: How will we generate new ideas?

“In this scenario, generative AI significantly changes the incentive structure for creators, and raises risks for businesses and society,” De Cremer, Bianzino and Falk caution. “If cheaply made generative AI undercuts authentic human content, there’s a real risk that innovation will slow down over time as humans make less and less new art and content.”

This could also mean fundamental changes to what content creation looks like. If production costs fall close to nothing, that opens up the possibility of reaching specific — and often more marginalized — audiences through extreme personalization and versioning.

That sounds like a bonus — except that if enhanced personalized experiences are applied broadly, “then we run the risk of losing the shared experience of watching the same film, reading the same book, and consuming the same news,” says HBR.

“In that case, it will be easier to create politically divisive viral content, and significant volumes of mis/disinformation, as the average quality of content declines alongside the share of authentic human content.”

The third potential scenario that the HBR authors consider as possible is one where the “techlash” resumes with a focus against algorithmically-generated content. In this scenario, humans maintain a competitive advantage against algorithmic competition.

“One plausible effect of being inundated with synthetic creative outputs is that people will begin to value authentic creativity more again and may be willing to pay a premium for it.”

It follows that political leadership taking action to strengthen governance of information spaces will be needed to deal with the downside risks that could emerge. For instance, content moderation needs are likely to explode as information platforms are overwhelmed with false or misleading content, and therefore require human intervention and carefully designed governance frameworks to counter.

Is computational creativity possible? A pair of academics have come up with a reassuring answer. Chloe Preece and Hafize Çelik write in The Conversation that the key characteristic of AI’s creative processes today is that computational creativity is systematic, not impulsive, unlike humans. Generative AI is programmed to process information in a certain way to achieve particular results predictably, albeit in often unexpected ways.

“In fact, this is perhaps the most significant difference between artists and AI: while artists are self- and product-driven, AI is very much consumer-centric and market-driven — we only get the art we ask for, which is not perhaps, what we need.”

Preece and Celik conclude that, so far, generative AI seems to work best with human partners — even acting as a catalyst for human creativity.

“Art history shows us that technology has rarely directly displaced humans from work they wanted to do. Think of the camera, for example, which was feared due to its power to put portrait painters out of business. What are the business implications for the use of synthetic creativity by AI, then?”

They note that AI has been known to “hallucinate” — an industry term for spewing nonsense — and that human skill is required to make sense of it — “that is expressing concepts, ideas and truths, rather than just something that is pleasing to the senses. Curation is therefore needed to select and frame, or reframe, a unified and compelling vision.”

READ MORE: Google Exec Warns of AI Chatbot ‘Hallucinations.’ What Is That Supposed to Mean? (Entrepreneur)

READ MORE: Is AI Creativity Possible? (The Conversation)

A similarly optimistic view is held by Ahmed Elgammal, professor at the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. Writing at Science Focus, he says the current generation of AI is limited to copying the work of humans and that it must be controlled largely by people to create something useful.

“It’s a great tool but not something that can be creative itself,” Elgammal says. “We must be conscious about what’s happening in the world and have an opinion to create real art. The AIs simply don’t have this.”

READ MORE: Why AI will ultimately lose the war of creativity with humanity (Science Focus)